Discussion: Day 2 Results & Maps Posted!

I *might* have just enough juice left to crank out The Bracket and post it tonight.

Speaking of The Bracket, Siri Christopherson (as top female) gets the official, Sharpie-filled version that we used for the weekend. However, if you would like your own commemorative version to hang up, I can get one made for you for about $30. (This one would have results printed on it, not handwritten.)

Great writeup and very interesting reflections!
I´m getting more and more excited and would like to try this at home!

How many volunteers were involved "live"? I realise you need separate start and finish personell due to the intensity of starts and finishes every three minutes. And possibly someone (or two) only keeping the scores on the bracket updated. What else?

Maps and course planning is a more long term job of course while putting out the controls can be handled by a separate team just before the event.

Finish Chief - This is probably the most hectic of the day-of-event jobs. She wrote some code this year that spits out heat assignments in a format that's great for me (as the guy filling in the bracket) and for the Start Chief for the next round. The code doesn't handle ties well, nor non-standard finishes like MP or DNS (we had a lot of DNS this year for various reasons), which need to be done manually. This role also has some significant work leading up to SART, like prepping all of the files and such (and writing code to make the bracket work a little more smoothly).

Course setting team (4 people) - This crew is basically magic. I give them all of the stuff on Saturday morning (stands, cones, SI boxes, flags, and course-setting maps), and they go set, vet, and take down everything. The Saturday events this year were easier than previous years because all four races were really close together and the schedule was longer with the night-o. In the two previous years, we had two teams of two. One team would set, vet, and take down the Time Trial, then leapfrog everyone and repeat at Round 2. The other team would do Rounds 1 and 3. We also learned this year that we can survive with a team of three on Sunday, as one of the crew unexpectedly couldn't make it. One thing that helps this run smoothly is that I go out on Friday and put out pinflags for every control location for the weekend.

Food Chief - She brings all of the food. Food makes people happy between races!

Thanks for the extra info on volunteers Patrick. I think I have a clear enough picture of what can be done.

..and writing code to make the bracket work a little more smoothly..What event software are you using and how do you actually tie that to the bracket (or do you still enter results manually after some kind of sorting in the software results)?

This is some of what we have available for sprints plus a few "outliers". A few of the areas on this overview map are quite intricate with lots of route choice and similarly looking houses to make it extra confusing.

The club uses Sport Software, so I guess that's OE? (I've never really gotten into the timing system stuff.)

The bracket was originally built in Excel but I didn't write any formulas. The finish chief did, so for 2015 and 2016 we exported a .csv file from OE, import that into Excel, and then all of the Excel lookups automatically filled in the bracket.

Because the night-o changed the schedule in 2017, the Excel bracket changed quite a bit, so the finish chief decided to use her newly-acquired Python coding skills instead of re-writing the Excel formulas.

At the current state, it doesn't interface with the bracket, but it does spit out next heat assignments, which I use to manually fill in the vinyl bracket (which is fun to do), and that the start chief uses. It also works well to ensure that the forked Round 5 map variations get in the hands of the right people.

The code is also set up to easily handle different bracket sizes (eg: bumping up to 96 or down to 64).

The guy who wrote the 3600-word recap is a more experienced programmer, and we chatted a bit about having a live TV screen showing an updated bracket as people finish. Something to possibly look into for next year, depending on logistics. (This would have worked really well this year, since we had one indoor event center each day, with tables and power. Not so much last year since we were outside the whole time and had to pack up and go each time.)